


(you must know that i'll follow you)

by paperclipbitch



Category: James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Doctor Who, Community: fanfic50, Gen, If You Squint - Freeform, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-12
Updated: 2013-04-12
Packaged: 2017-12-08 07:18:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/758601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bond is a warrior, a vestige of a war already long lost, with nowhere left to turn.</p>
<p>Q tells himself he can’t empathise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(you must know that i'll follow you)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alba17](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alba17/gifts).



> My prompt was _Bond/Q Doctor Who AU - flying too close to the sun._ [Title is from _Whatever’s Left_ by Snow Patrol] This was totally more sad and less cracky than it was supposed to be, waaaah. I skipped this up the list a little because I fell in love with the idea of timelord!Q. Like, I still want to write the Bond-is-a-timelord fic one day, but this is not that fic. This is just… IDK, angst? Also written for fanfic50: 008. _by my side._

“Q,” Bond says urgently, gun crackling in his hands, “Q, I’m running out of ammunition here.”

Q slots his screwdriver between his teeth, braces one foot against the TARDIS floor, and _pushes_. “Nearly there,” he calls, muffled, hooking fingertips into the bottom of the console and praying that the right wires stay connected. “Come on, girl,” he mumbles around the sonic, dragging himself out from underneath, hopping to his feet, and reaching for the nearest lever.

“They’re nearly here!” Bond snaps; firm, but not anxious. He doesn’t get anxious.

“Yes,” Q murmurs, “untwist your knickers, Bond.”

Bond doesn’t laugh, but barks an ugly sound that might just do, and the Tardis doors slam shut with a few seconds to spare. She whooshes and they both stagger sideways with her momentum, Q laughing, Bond finally uncurling his fingers from his gun.

“There,” Q says, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Bond’s expression is nothing short of incredulous.

 

 

Eve knows everything because that’s what she does, has always done, probably always will even when Q has finally done something stupid enough to wipe himself from the face of the universe. 

She pours out tea for them both, smile carefully superior, legs folded elegantly. Q used to be able to do elegance, he’s sure of it, but this body is gangly, awkward, and prone to occasional fits of awkward flailing. He folds himself into the chair opposite hers, watching stars spinning out into the void beyond them, silvery bright.

“Bond,” Eve begins, fingers wrapped around her teacup, sitting back and regarding him with dark eyes.

Eve’s planet has been gone a long time, but the people are still scattered across the universe with their lives that never seem to end, their unnerving telepathy, and their constant calm.

“No,” Q replies.

“You’ve lost people before,” Eve points out, quiet. “People have left you before. So why-”

“Bond doesn’t have anywhere to go anymore either,” Q sighs, because being the last of the Time Lords is _lonely_ , a feeling of constant absence nagging at his senses, something he can never cure. 

He thinks Eve’s expression is waxing pity, but he doesn’t look too closely, just in case.

 

 

Bond is a warrior, a vestige of a war already long lost, with nowhere left to turn.

Q tells himself he can’t empathise.

 

Sometimes he sleeps, sometimes he doesn’t, and the only place that time has no meaning is _inside a time machine_. 

It’s still late when he walks through the console room to find the doors are open, filling the darkened room with the soft light of hundreds of stars and a dying sun. Bond is sitting in the doorway, feet dangling above nothing, while the Tardis spins quietly on.

Q doesn’t need to look or to ask to know that he’s drunk.

He’s travelled with so many people over the years, and none of them were like Bond, his stiff shoulders, hollow eyes. They haven’t always come travelling with him because they just wanted to see the world: sometimes his friends, companions are running _to_ ; sometimes they are running _from_.

Bond… well, Bond is just plain running.

“Long night?” he asks, light.

“I don’t need a babysitter, Q,” Bond responds, but he shifts over far enough for Q to sit beside him. He offers the bottle – a cheap but potent alcohol made only in the Fandite System and classed as an illegal substance on over eight hundred planets – and Q shakes his head, looks out over the big, dark universe that never seems to get less lonely.

 

 

Q isn’t needlessly reckless, or at least he never used to be, and his previous body lived to a magnificent old age. That was what he looked like the first time Bond met him; both of them locked up for very different reasons on a planet that clearly had no interest in its own welfare. Bond was bloody-faced and silent and angry, eyes too-blue in a face that wore an entirely flat expression and a wealth of bruising. The guards hadn’t unchained his hands when they pushed him into the communal cell, which spoke volumes.

He was semi-certain he’d cracked a rib, his body growing tired in a way his mind never could, and whichever escape plans he came up with required better motor control of his fingers than he had. Regeneration, Q reflected, was fast becoming less of an option and more of a necessity. Trying to keep the universe from eating itself was a young body’s game; it required a body that, when told to, could _run_. 

Actual regeneration came thirteen and a half hours later, by Tardis time, anyway, on the floor of the console room, Bond’s hastily-acquired gun tossed to one side, his strong, furious hands tangled in Q’s shirt before he had to stagger away from the viciousness of the light.

Q sat up in clothes that were suddenly too baggy, pushing a fringe of hair out of his eyes, and said in a voice that was lighter than expected: “Well, I suppose I have some explaining to do.”

 

 

Timelords adopt names for themselves; he chose Quartermaster as his when he left Gallifrey, but it’s possibly only the scattered remains of the Daleks that know him by that name. 

 

 

James Bond is almost as legendary as Q is, although in an entirely different way: he has a girl and a warrant for his arrest on every planet, a cache of war stories he won’t tell that Q’s already heard, and he involves fear in a way that Q probably never will. Eve points out, occasionally, that if Q is so determined to be a saviour then perhaps he shouldn’t be travelling with a well-publicised assassin, the last soldier left of the infamous MI6 regiment, part of a war where the two sides escalated their attacks but not their defences, and if there’s anyone left but Bond then they’ve gone so deep into hiding that they’ll never be found again.

Bond doesn’t like to talk about it, of course, the orphan picked up and moulded to the desires of his superiors, and if he doesn’t sleep and eats sporadically and drinks enough to kill a normal person then Q has no great desire to pull apart a coping mechanism that’s obviously working because Bond doesn’t kill with his bare hands anymore.

What Q can’t tell Eve, doesn’t tell Eve, is that perhaps he likes having another war veteran with him, reminding him that things can always get better, can always get worse.

 

 

The workshop is three levels down, to the left of the library, and hardly ever switches places with the wardrobe unless Q really needs a clean cardigan.

“What are you tinkering with now?” Bond asks, a sardonic twist to his mouth, hands wrapped around a mug of tea. He hasn’t brought any for Q, but that’s alright; Bond makes _terrible_ tea.

“It’s either going to help repair atmospheric deterioration, create a new element, or make an amazing cup of coffee,” Q replies, twirling a spanner between his fingers. “Or possibly an appalling cup of coffee, but still better than the ones you make.”

Bond’s smiles are rare and fragile things, but Q has learned how to earn them in their time together, rattling around inside a Tardis that loves them both despite it all, doing things they probably shouldn’t, the stars and perhaps Eve their only witnesses.

He sips his tea and watches Q work, leaning back against a bench and knowing better than to touch anything. For want of a more suitable word, it’s peaceful.

 

 

Eve says he doesn’t need someone as bad as he is, as reckless as he is, that this can end in nothing but mutual disaster. She says it kindly, sporadically, looking a little more serene every time he sees her, drifting away from the defiant child she was once, burning eyes, a knife in her hand, her planet crumbling to ashes.

The longer you live, the more you have to watch the present become the past, watch the past become a memory, and then not even that anymore.

Bond is bleak and dangerous and bloody-handed, half-crazed and still partially living in a war that nobody was alive to win. And what Q did to his own race in order to survive doesn’t bear thinking about, talking about, though it’s folded into his every vein, every third breath.

Perhaps he is tempting fate. But Q’s been alive long enough to learn a few things, and not all of them were good.

 

 

Maybe the truth of it all, when you get down to the _heart_ of it, is that Bond is a terrible fit and therefore a perfect one, someone Q can never hope to understand and already knows on a level deep enough to be spiritual, a person the universe fears almost as much as it fears him. He’s murderous and monosyllabic and darkly sharply hurt, but he’s maybe the only person who has made the Tardis honestly feel like home.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] (you must know that i'll follow you)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/769426) by [themusecalliope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/themusecalliope/pseuds/themusecalliope)




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